A Motherboard With All The Bling

High-end motherboards with RGB lighting features seem to be all the rage these days, with the early 2000s aesthetics of adding LED lights for bling effects returning with a vengeance.

The AORUS brand is typically more known to PC enthusiasts as GIGABYTE’s line of gaming motherboards, but with the introduction of Intel’s new Kaby Lake processors, it appears that the name is set to include some of the company’s high-end line of motherboards as well.

Out of the box, the board sports an LGA1151 processor socket, which supports both Skylake and Kaby Lake processors. The four DDR4 DIMM slots beside it is capable of supporting a configuration of up to 64GBs of RAM, which can be overclocked to speeds of up to a whopping 4,133MHz.

As far as storage is concerned, the motherboard sports six SATA III 6.0Gbps ports, as well as two M.2 and U.2 NVMe SSD ports, each capable of speeds of up to 32Gbps. The board sports four PCIe slots, and can support both AMD and NVIDIA’s multi-GPU configurations, with up to four GPUs installed. As far as I/O ports go, the AORUS Gaming 9 motherboard is quite generous, featuring one HDMI and DisplayPort, five USB 3.1 Gen1 ports, one each of USB 3.1 Gen 2 Type A and Type C ports, as well as two MMCX antenna connectors for WiFi connectivity.

Overclockers, or watercooling enthusiasts will love the fact that GIGABYTE worked with EK Water Blocks to create the G-Frost Hybrid water block to cool not only the processor, but the chipsets on the motherboard as well. This is important, especially if one is looking to push overclocking limits on the PC for better performance and scores.

But perhaps the number one feature on this particular motherboard is the RGB Fusion. Featuring 16.8 million colours, six light zones, eight programmable sections, and two RGBW strip pin headers, you can bling out your PC to your heart’s content with this motherboard.

CHIP CONCLUDE: If you’re thinking of building a PC with all the bells and whistles and lights, the AORUS Z270X Gaming 9 is definitely one to look out for.